LTS versus staying on latest

LTS versus staying on latest

Posted Aug 20, 2024 9:58 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Sigh, not seeing the forest… by Vorpal
Parent article: FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system

I worked at a place where we transitioned from LTS to staying on latest while I was there; there were two impacts of this change:

1. The bug count went down overall, but the specific bugs we were facing kept changing. This was acceptable for us, since we could work with upstream to fix the ones we cared about, and it didn't matter that the exact set of bugs varied with time, only that we had no important bugs.
2. Upstream were much more willing and able to work with us on the bugs we cared about when we were using their latest code than they were with LTS code. As a corollary of this, we got much more support for fixing regressions, because upstream were much more willing to revert the improvement that caused a regression for us while they found a version that fixed the regression than they were when we came in via LTSes (where the attitude was often "well, if we simply revert while we find a fix, we cause a regression for this other user").

Based on this experience, I would say that LTSes are the right approach when it's critical that there are no regressions but you're happy to live with the existing set of bugs, while staying up to date is the right approach when you can handle a regression but are unhappy having to live with known bugs.

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